LEXINGTON, KY. — John Calipari apologized to his University of Kentucky basketball team Monday. He should've seen it sooner, he told them. But better late than never, so Calipari made a mystery "tweak" that he claims "changed everything" and has buoyed the players' sagging confidence heading into this week's SEC Tournament.

"If he's wrong about something, he's going to say he's wrong, and then he's going to fix it," center Willie Cauley-Stein said of his coach. "That's just being a man. And when you get to that point, where you know you're wrong and you can admit it, that's powerful. You get a rally from your team after that."

That's what Calipari, whose team lost three of four games to close the regular season, is counting on.

The tweak came, coincidentally, on the same day the Wildcats (22-9) became the first team in 34 years to plummet from preseason No. 1 to out of The Associated Press Top 25. So what exactly is this magical elixir that might have arrived just in time to save a disappointing season?

"You're not getting it from me," star forward Julius Randle repeated four times Tuesday, grinning each time.

"You've just got to wait until Friday to see it," guard James Young said. "I think we're just going to be playing a lot better."

Piecing together vague answers from the Cats, it seems the tweak was twofold: Calipari made practice far more physical l — pummeling players with pads and drilling them to attack more aggressively on both offense and defense — and tinkered with the offense somehow to improve ball movement.

"You'll see a different team when you watch Friday. If you know anything about basketball, you'll know exactly what I did," Calipari said. "I'm just disappointed in me that I didn't do it earlier. Why didn't I catch this and why wasn't I thinking in those terms?"

Calipari attempted to answer his own question, saying he was distracted by all the other fires he had to put out over the course of the season as he worked to improve individual performances and also blend a bunch of freshmen and sophomores — most of them McDonald's All Americans — into a cohesive unit.

"There were a lot of things," he said, including a bum hip that needs to be replaced after the season. Calipari joked: "I think it was the drugs I was taking for a while that got me where I wasn't thinking right. But normally I would catch it and try something earlier."

That's why Calipari apologized to the team Monday, "because it was very clear when you saw it." Calipari compared the Tweak That Shall Not Be Named to a "Eureka!" moment for a business owner who has seen sales or production decline and tries and fails more than once to fix it.

"You can't put your finger on it," he said, "and then something happens and you look and you say, 'That was it!' I was just sitting at home on Sunday and it just popped in my mind and I just said, 'You know what? Let's do it. Let's do this.' "

Calipari said in Monday's practice he emphasized defenders playing with hands up and banging with their bodies any opponents who attempt to drive or post up — and conversely, on offense, for the Cats to play through that kind of contact. He'd coached his team all season to think "hands off, you can't touch anybody" because of the new officiating emphasis.

"So basically we're back to where we were a year ago when everybody said, 'You foul on every possession to win.' So we just had to practice that way," Calipari said.

Cauley-Stein said the team went back and looked at clips of previous opponents and "you can just see everybody else bodying us … and you wonder why we weren't doing that the whole time." But now that's the plan, and the players seem to like it.

"We're a big, strong, athletic team," said Randle, who is 6 feet 9, 250 pounds. "Being physical is kind of part of our game. Taking away from our physicality kind of takes away from our aggression. I think it will be a return to that."

"It felt normal, felt like we were back in our groove," Cauley-Stein said. "We kind of had that feel, almost like that swagger was coming back to our team."

That remains to be seen Friday, when the Wildcats face either LSU or Alabama in the SEC quarterfinals.

"All I can tell you is there was a different feel in the building. It was not just the tweaking of what we did. It was the physical play brought something out of them that I wanted to see," Calipari said.